If you’re not floored, blame the topic. You’ve also got the likely official reaction of Microsoft and Google, which sell a lot more of their own online spreadsheets. What Quip is doing bears a closer look, though. These developers are thinking about how much being mobile with access to lots of computing is changing how we work and live, and it’s betting that in the long term, this transformation will touch the big companies.

In particular, Quip has a design approach of making something that is shared, added to or changed from anywhere by many people. There is a similar principle in other new collaboration tools like Slack, used for team communication, and Talko, a voice collaboration service that makes conversation into something durable and searchable.

“We’re trying to keep data from being trapped in a single place,” said Bret Taylor, Quip’s cofounder and the former chief technical officer at Facebook. “Long term, our competitive advantage is that we’ve thrown out the idea of the stored file.”

Spreadsheets, like Microsoft Excel, might seem an unlikely candidate for this treatment. They are, however, the world’s most popular tools for the analysis of data, the lifeblood of our age. We rely on rows and columns not just for figuring out things like employee hours worked, expenses and inventory, but planning scenarios and generating graphics. It may look like accounting, but it is important, and potentially vivid, content creation.

The Quip spreadsheet, which the company started offering Thursday at no additional charge of $12 per user a month for its business version, takes that content aspect very seriously. The spreadsheet, which offers over 400 formulas and math functions, can be automatically inserted into a document, or used on its own.

If numbers from the spreadsheet are mentioned in a document, changing a number in either the document or the spreadsheet also makes that change in the other area. Quip is also inherently collaborative, so it’s possible so see who among a stream of people messaging and reading the work made the change. It’s also possible to revert back to earlier versions.

More than a document or a spreadsheet, Quip’s initial blank page is intended to be a blank, on which any of its content categories (document, spreadsheet, image, Web link, software code, even a person associated with the group) can be embedded. People choose which thing they want through a pull-down menu, or by typing the “@” symbol.

It’s not visible to the consumer, but each cell inside the spreadsheet has its own Web address (thank you, nearly infinite amounts of cloud computing storage.) That means that, as well as interacting with other numbers in other cells to, say, add up a sum of restaurant receipts, the numbers can be linked from one format to another, like spreadsheets to documents. Mr. Taylor calls these many addresses “the atomic units” of Quip on the page, which are not “saved” to memory in a permanent sense, as much as “synched” to a cloud-based master repository for all the data.

The upshot is a more continuous style of communication, without clicking between one program and another. Even while in a document, the spreadsheet can also be broken out as its own product. In either form, collaboration is implicit, with people able to discuss what they are working on.

Either separately or at the same time, people can also “like” one another’s changes. If applying the sentiment of “liking” to a change in receivables is arguably a further denigration of human exuberance in the face of social media, think of “like” as a placeholder for “yeah, I saw your change and it’s o.k.”

The most intriguing thing about all this is the way every action, whether introducing a spreadsheet, changing a cell or adding a new formula, seems almost in service of a future action. It always feels as if something else might be done, and will be when more data shows up.